AI Bubble? – CleanTechnica

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We all know the buzzword of the day — AI. AI is going to solve countless problems at it gets infinitely smarter and more useful. We just need to build bigger and bigger datacenters. Hence the reason companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Tesla are building or buying nuclear, natural gas, and renewable energy power plants — to power their constantly growing warehouses of computers. The more computer hardware, the better — more, more, MORE.

Billions upon billions of dollars are being poured into this, with the idea that someone is going to really hit the jackpot and achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).

However, word on the street is that these bigger and bigger data centers are seeing diminishing returns, and experts in the field are highly skeptical the brute force scale up, scale up, scale up approach will ever lead to AGI. Futurism just referenced a new survey of AI researchers. The summary: “Asked whether ‘scaling up’ current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was ‘unlikely’ or ‘very unlikely’ to succeed.” That’s quite a damning response from experts in the field.

“Published in a new report, the findings of the survey, which queried 475 AI researchers and was conducted by scientists at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, offer a resounding rebuff to the tech industry’s long-preferred method of achieving AI gains — by furnishing generative models, and the data centers that are used to train and run them, with more hardware. Given that AGI is what AI developers all claim to be their end game, it’s safe to say that scaling is widely seen as a dead end.”

What does that mean, then? What does it mean if these companies are pouring billions upon billions of dollar and generating terawatt-hours of electricity to power bigger and bigger AI data centers with diminishing returns? Well, it’s going to mean different things to different people, but to me, it’s a waste of money and energy — creating more emissions than we need to creating, and leading to more global heating. In short: it’s a net loss for society, especially taking opportunity cost into account.

However, the tech giants still think it’s the smart play. “In December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai went on the record as saying that easy AI gains were ‘over’ — but confidently asserted that there was no reason the industry couldn’t ‘just keep scaling up.’” Hmm…. “[I]f Microsoft’s commitment to still spending tens of billions of dollars on data centers is any indication, brute force scaling is still going to be the favored MO for the titans of the industry — while it’ll be left to the scrappier startups to scrounge for ways to do more with less.” There is much discussion here of DeepSeek, the super efficient AI company out of China that recently took the industry by storm, doing much more with much less by being smarter. But … the key takeaway is that we’re just going to keep building bigger and bigger data centers for more and more scaling of AI.

One final question that’s been coming into my thoughts from time to time is this: are we creating a big AI bubble? We’ll see….